In New York state, divorce laws require that adultery be proved before a marriage can be dissolved. Many thousands of divorces are granted there every year on this basis-admitted evidence of adulterous behavior by either the husband or wife. Looking further we see that adultery is also a misdemeanor criminal offense in New York. Can you imagine how many cases of prosecution of crime under this statute take place in a year in New York? Yes, you guessed it-almost none.

This gives us a picture of the "double standard." And where does it all come from? Unfortunately it comes basically from our religious heritagean anti-sexuality made into a taboo in the ancient Jewish culture, taken into Christianity, refined to utmost severity by narrow sectarian groups such as the Puritans, codified into our law, and brought forward to shackle us today.

Two recognized research psychologists, Drs. Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, call this a mania for clinging to sexual misery in our culture today. We go around, they say, knocking our brains out treating symptoms but we never dare to get to the real disease which originated in the church, and is now centered in law and politics. What are the symptoms we treat? Divorce is one. Alcoholism is another. Excessive use of drugs, soaring rates of i'legitimacy, juvenile delinquency, and so on and on. How do we treat these symptoms of our anti-sexual heritage? We pass laws against human nature and try to change legally what religion itself cannot do with less strict penalties. We build a towering bureaucracy to curb, confine and "treat" those few social renegades who either get caught in the act, or who for other reasons break under the strain of trying to appear to be one thing when they know they are something else. We invent the concept of sin, tack it onto those things which the louder voices among us disapprove, and so on and on.

What is the result? Guilt, neurosis, psychosis, and outright misery. We cannot build mental hospitals fast enough to house the line of persons waiting to get in. Once inside we find trained men and women who are experts on "curing" man's mental ills but they are still afraid of getting at the truth of the matter. And that's only a part of the long chain of "failures" in our culture centered around this universal and all-pervasive human drive.

How so many of us do achieve some semblance (at least outwardly) of a happy sexual adjustment in terms of the official morality we pay lip service to is practically a miracle.

About the first words any of us hear (imprinting themselves upon the unconscious if the conscious mind is too undeveloped to remember) are the words which tell what sex we are when born. I understand that's the

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first thing a mother wants to know. Doctors have declared that those are the first words spoken, at least as soon as the genitals emerge in the birth process and the identification is certain.

This sex differentiation leads off a whole chain of manifestations which develop and increase throughout our period of growth. Sexual hungers assert themselves at an early age-they are natural. But we give in to them only if we are unaware of what they are. A mother, for instance, noticed a lusty laugh in a seven-month-old-boy when she pulled back the foreskin of his penis in bathing. She was a little shocked, however, when she was assured that her infant son was indeed getting a sexual thrill in the process. We permit children to bounce upon the crossed leg of an adult in "rocking horse" fashion, because the kids enjoy it so much. But shall we keep it up if we are told that the little boy or girl enjoys it so much because unconsciously-yet very naturally-it is a kind of sexual pleasure? Or shall we condemn it?

Dr. Kinsey once told of taking the "sex histories" of small children, Actually all he did was to determine attitudes. For instance he asked a little three-year-old girl if she wore lipstick.

"No," the child replied slowly.

"Well, don't you have lipstick?" Dr. Kinsey asked.

Again the little girl shook her head and said no. "Then, do you ever get into mommy's lipstick?"

The child hesitated to answer, then came out with another slow replythis time, yes.

Yes, she did go to her mother's dresser sometimes and put on a little lipstick.

Next Dr. Kinsey asked her, "Now, do you ever wear daddy's lipstick?" The little girl frowned, was puzzled, and thought a moment. Then she answered, "But Daddys don't wear lipstick-only mommies do."

This, Dr. Kinsey demonstrated, was a kind of interview which established a sexual attitude. Already in the three-year-old girl there were attitudes formed about what was for men, and what was for women, and there was a reaction which demonstrated that lipstick was unmanly.

Such things as this are manifest again and again in our lives. They shape our personalities, they formulate our attitudes, and are the foundations for our prejudices. We seldom stop to go into the background and see why. Sometimes if we did we would get a surprise, too. Again, sticking with the lipstick, let's look a little into the background of it. When did it start and what was it for?

It is no secret that man has long used cosmetics of various kinds. Many primitive peoples still turn out with the males more painted than the females. But not the real he-men in our culture.